Outside in the City: Youth Subjectivity and Trajectories in Urban Adventure Therapy
My project looks at the practices of an urban, Chicago-based adventure therapy organization, with an eye towards how diagnosis and labelling shape their practice and youth experience. As is typical for urban outdoor education organizations, this one—Directions—offers a broad range of developmental outdoor programming. Typically, this involves structured challenge in an adventure sport, like kayaking, rock climbing or cycling, alongside intensive reflection work. Directions describes their work as therapeutic and they operate with a clinical framework. Directions mostly serves young people who are in some way marked as needing (therapeutic) rehabilitation. Some of these are programs for gang-involved youth, youth with behavioral challenges or exposure to community violence. Some are programs with more of an enhancement focus—leadership programs, or community development organizations. On one hand, most youth coming to Directions (whether through “leadership” or “rehabilitation” programs), share demographics—many are Black or Latine, and most are low-income and from poor parts of Chicago. On the other hand, these groups of young people arrive occupying very differently labelled social positions (“problematic” or “leader”). Nevertheless, Directions has a decidedly anti-labelling ethos. Within the scope of this summer project, I set out to examine the role that such characterizations play in both the forms of development youth are offered, and the ways they take them up. This prompts the following research questions: does the AT modality operate differently in rehabilitative and leadership-oriented programs? Is one therapeutic and the other not? Are Directions staff acting on distinct “problems” when they approach these groups? Ultimately, how does social location shape youths’ experience there and sense of possibility for the future?
Report
The SPA-RLF Fellowship enabled me to complete a successful summer of fieldwork: I collected a significant amount of data, have been able to draw some initial conclusions and, most importantly, have begun to develop a contextually informed dissertation research question. RLF funds largely supported my transportation to and from Directions programming (sometimes giving staff/participants rides or toting outdoor equipment) during the 3-month period of fieldwork. Acting as a “volunteer”/researcher, and working alongside Directions staff, I participated in over 350 hours of formal Directions programming this summer, and I continue to be involved in the Directions community throughout this school year. RLF funds allowed me to attend a week-long, out-of-state “expedition” which served as a sort of capstone experience for some participants who participate regularly in Directions weekly programming. Finally, and most recently—RLF funds enabled me to attend the annual meetings of the Therapeutic Adventure Professional Group, where I was able to observe sessions on the future of AT, meet key figures in the field, and develop connections that will help me set up sites for my dissertation project.
Next Steps
Fieldwork this summer has set the stage for the development of my dissertation proposal, and Directions will be a site that I continue to engage with and include in my dissertation project. The broader field of adventure therapy (AT) represents a multiplicity of youth practices—including the general development of mindsets, skills, and dispositions for success in school and social life, as well as targeted treatment for substance abuse, behavioral and mental health issues. The broader AT professional community is in a moment of transition, eager to professionalize, build an evidence base and move towards more targeted (diagnosis-based), and explicitly clinical work. This thrust is at odds with Directions’s anti-labelling ethos, though it is one that the broader field sees as a way to root out bias and potential abuse from the practice. I hope to track this tension in my dissertation project, through ethnographic engagement in 3 different AT sites—which all take different approaches to diagnosis and labelling of youth “problems” while using the same modality and otherwise similar set of clinical activities, strategies and ideas. Further, I plan to use my remaining RLF fellowship funds to attend the next in-person SPA meetings, as well as begin conducting interviews with key figures in the AT field.